Poetry, Life, Literature
-- Lawrence Kimmel
“Poetry is more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history”, - Aristotle
“No evil can touch one who looks upon beauty; he feels at one with the world”, - Goethe
“Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, for poetry makes nothing happen.” - W.H.Auden
“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”. - Shakespeare
The theme of the poetry of life reaches deep into the essential questions of human
existence. In the sense that poetry is the central core of literature, it is fundamental to the
meaning of our lives. The question of the poetry of life does not necessarily place human
life, nor indeed biological life at the center of inquiry. Arguably, even the inorganic
workings of world and universe exhibit poetic features. We will focus, however, on the
sense in which life itself is poetic, and great literature--in this essay we will refer only to
that--is recognized by its capacity to capture and express that fact. When literature does
this it penetrates to the heart of human accord and resonance with creation, and so fits the
description „universal‟ literature. A simpler view would be: a fundamental, essential
poetics.
I
Poetry in/of Life
The question of the poetry of life in literature presents two separate and related
possibilities of reference. If it is life itself which is poetic and the subject of agency, the
problematic of creativity is complex indeed. A more usual way of approach is to
consider that it is the living of life that is poetic, or not. Both are interesting questions,
and perhaps collapse into one in the context of literature. T.S.Eliot put the question in
choruses from The Rock: „Where is the Life we have lost in living?‟ which suggests a
useful distinction between life and the active living of it. One can lose one‟s life, in
Eliot‟s phrase, in vacant afternoons of distraction measured out in coffee spoons.
Shakespeare‟s reminder that the coward dies many times before his death has an
everyday corollary, that the idle dead can go on half alive, without passion and without
poetry in their hearts. On the other side of it, one paradoxically can raise her individual
life to a poetic level in losing it, e.g. in the spiritual conviction that no greater love than to
lay down one‟s life for another.
Life as such, merely to be alive, is surely not poetic, with the possible miraculous
exception of the moment of birth. If lived life is poetic, it requires more than a continued
presence. If poetry is anything it is affirmation, neither resignation nor endurance will
satisfy out sense of its importance. From this point of view, it is not life but a sense of
engaged life which carries the poetic. Life understood as poetic counterpoint to death, is
love. Where death itself is without meaning, so is life, and the dead continue to live or
not, indifferent to the poetry of life. Where there is no love, or care, no concern, no
celebration, nothing to sing, no impulse to dance, then life lacks even the impulse of the
poetic.
Nothing ensures the poetic in life, and there are countless ways in which it may be
absent. One cannot always mark the day the music died, but it is a sure symptom when
there are no songs in the hearts of a people. Poetry can arise in poverty, find its voice
under oppression, it only dies when there is no longer remembrance or hope, joy or
despair, only when the possibilities of life no longer make a difference in the lives of
those who have them. Although the poetry of life seems to require only the courage of its
expression, that courage is often lost in simple forgetfulness, more often lost through ease
and indifference than pain or hardship. Eliot‟s Hollow Men, Gerontians, and J. Alfred
Prufrocks all lament their loss of life in living as a result of thinking too much and feeling
too little, or in only thinking, and rethinking, before the taking of tea. From the standpoint
of Eliot‟s men with headpiece filled with straw, the poetic requires the passion of
pressing the moment to its crisis, and is therefore a thing first to be avoided, then
lamented.
To analyze the poetry of life in literature, the prior question of what in and of life
is poetic, or perhaps better, how life is poetic, needs a clear answer. Only then can we
address what and how such poetry is expressed and embodied in literature.
If we stay with the perspective of a lived life, what conditions are requisite to its poetic
embodiment? We might begin with the borderline case of children: is innocence a
resource for a poetic life? The life of the child itself may be a poetic theme of
expression; it is a separate question whether the child is capable of giving poetic
expression to her life in art. An initial intuition would suggest that a further knowledge
and emotional awareness are required to live one‟s life poetically.
The poetry of life itself may simply occur as a happening, but poetry in literature
is a making. Poiesis, the Greek word „to make‟, is also a „making space.‟ It requires not
only reflective self-consciousness, but the imaginative distance to form a separate world.
We can mark this difference in the child‟s perception and expression of her world, and
the capacity to structure the meaning of this seeing or hearing. The empirical question of
what age art becomes possible for the child is aside from our present concern, but clearly
it connects. Presumably it does not require a poet to live poetically, but we might insist
that some maturity of understanding is necessary--or not. Mozart comes to mind, of
course.
Poetic expression may be realized through other modes than art--through actions
and relationships for example--all of which contribute to a poetic life. If that is so, then a
poetic life does not require language and hence not literature. If it is not dependent on, or
a reflection of literature, the poetic would seem to constitute an independent
phenomenon, so that different modes and mediums--life and literature--may express this
same content and meaning. In which case, life and literature are to be understood as
analogues of some separate conceptual domain of the poetic. It is possible that the poetic
vision is the same in literature and life, and only the expression is variable--verbal, visual,
audial in literature, visceral in life.
Since our context is literature, not the whole of the arts, access to an analogue is
to be sought here. Presumably we can articulate what the poetic in literature is--the
problem is on the other side of moral life. What is not meant by the poetry of life,
arguably, is to make life itself into an aesthetic fiction in which one regards oneself and
manipulates others as if characters in a novel, moving pieces about randomly or by
design. In this minimal sense the poetic and moral converge.
There are, then, two approaches to the relation of poetry and life. The first is that
life itself, and not merely the living of it, is poetic--that there is a lyrical and creative
aspect to life itself, to nature, that invites the expression “poetry of life.” It is a different
matter to conceive of poetry as focused on or limited to the process of living, requiring
human consideration and action. We will consider the latter first as the easier question,
more commonly found in literature.
II
Poetry and Philosophy, Lives and Literature
There is a line in one of G.B.Shaw‟s plays, I think Man and Superman, in which a
character remarks to the effect that one should not confuse the poet and the lover, the
former only wants the feeling in order to write about it. This mirrors, but is also modified
by another famous remark of Shaw‟s that those who can, do; those who can‟t, teach.
Shaw clearly thought that art, in his case literature, was a mode of action of some sort,
different in kind from mere feeling and talking, and set apart from the casual or
instructive discourse of everyday living. The example of Socrates may be taken as a
further modification of Shaw‟s second claim; for Socrates, teaching is clearly a doing
something—it is transformational or else it is not teaching. That life and literature are not
the same takes no great wisdom to see, nor wit to distinguish. There are connections and
convergences which merit investigation, however, vital connections which can make a
life into what Heidegger called „poetic dwelling‟, and the literature which mirrors or
embodies it memorable or „immortal‟.
One might suppose that every life considered as a story and lived as an adventure
is, so far, poetic. Every life which is really a life, every life which affirms the wholeness
of life, is poetic—in the sense that poiesis is appropriately applied to any human activity
which is actively constructive. We are inclined, however, and with reason, to reserve
“poetic” for a field of creative activity wherein the imagination is engaged to produce
works of art. That is, art is poetic arguably to the degree its substance and energy are
gathered from the creative experience of life. Art is poetic only when it captures and
expresses the elemental poetry of life itself. But life, in turn, is only poetic under the
conception of art. There is a circle here that is inevitable when connecting art and life that
speaks to the force of their interdependence.
The many languages of art and the genres of literature--drama, lyric, epic, novel,
poem--frame and give expression to those passions which are the source of life, in which
living beings take delight in their very existence. Poetry comes fully to life only where
life is poetic, where the poet, painter, and composer can touch the joyful expression
which is life itself. When we ask that art be true to life, we do not mean the routine of
daily subsistence, we mean life fully open to its own possibilities. The literature of a
people is the expression and repository of those possibilities.
It may be thought that there are two imaginative but very different choices one
can make about one‟s life, less severe than those given to Achilles, though no less
important: to live a poetic life of creative possibility, or a philosophical life of analytic
surety. Are these different in kind—one creative, the other critical—or can they be
reconciled and integrated? On the surface of it, it would seem that to walk in beauty and
to pursue the truth are not only compatible, but interdependent and only a conception of
hermetically sealed disciplines would seem to argue the other way. Philosophy began
with the Greeks in just this limited and historically arbitrary way, by defining philosophy
in opposition to poetic imagination. It might seem preferable simply to by-pass this
beginning but it determined the direction philosophy was to take, and this bias still tends
to dictate the boundaries of rational discourse.
The ancient Greek legacy to the world includes an enduring framework for the
production of literature. The Greeks were not alone nor the first to connect literature and
life--think of the great epic of Gilgamesh. The records we have of archaic cultures
suggest that myth was a natural process of emergence; they produced stories of creation,
of heroism, of human endurance, stories through which to understand their own lives,
their history and character. Whether in oral or literate traditions the telling of stories
which become the stuff of literature attests to a poetic impulse at the root of all human
life and culture. But the Greeks transformed and shaped crude stories of elemental beings
and of singular characters into a rich literature of dramatic, lyric, epic, historical, and
philosophical genres, and in the process increased the capacity for the self-expression and
understanding of human life. Homer and Sophocles, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato
are still an essential part of the cultural education of every Western child.
But it is also in the Classical period with Plato, that philosophical discourse
became critically preclusive. Socrates‟ initial commitment to a life of engaged critical
discourse wedded serious and systematic inquiry to the task of learning how to live well.
It is not so clear, however, that living well in the Socratic sense, is to live poetically; in
fact it seems to be the reverse. Plato‟s dialectic of critical inquiry was intended to replace
the epic, lyric, and dramatic forms of expression which had depicted passionate, heroic,
and tragic life at its ebb and flow, as Shakespeare would later put it. So although
philosophy directly connects literature with life, the early Greek philosophers did not
mean “live poetically”--as if one‟s life were the expression of a poem, having beauty,
coherence, passion. Rather, they meant “live rationally.” To live well in the
philosophical sense was to subject one‟s motives, actions, relationships, desires, to
rational review, to develop a critical comportment toward one‟s own life. In the Socratic
expression, only the critically examined life is worth living, not the poetic or aesthetic
life, the life of art, or for that matter, any other life--the life of commerce or agriculture.
The Greek god of rationality was a jealous god which was to have no other before
it. By the time Aristotle refines the detail of how to live well, it has become an active
public life, but for all that, a gentleman‟s life, made possible by aristocratic leisure, and
most of all and still, rationally exclusive. If such remains the paradigm of the
philosophical life, it clearly precludes poetic expression. Any directive that constrains the
full potential and dimensions of human experience and expression, even if it serves a
form of truth, fails as an affirmation of life in beauty, does not reach through to the poetry
of life itself. Having said that, I fully believe there are other ways of conceiving,
practicing, and living philosophy which are poetic.
Both the philosophical and poetic life require a self-conscious distance from
mundane existence. One is not alive poetically; to live poetically requires thought,
imagination, resolution, and action, not mere existence. The distancing of perspective that
provides meaning to life is not merely conceptual and rational, but aesthetic and requires
poetic engagement. Sartre‟s reminder that one can think backwards, but only live forward
marks the fact that life is ongoing, however it is conceived, the only question is that of
engagement, quality and direction.
In Greek and traditional philosophy the primary critical contrast is not with
mundane existence, but with alternative framings of life through the use and kinds of
conceptual distance. In Greek culture the break with ordinary existence had already been
achieved in the great literature which preceded the development of analytic discourse.
Philosophy could then presuppose a high level of inquiry, so that the only concern of the
aristos was to frame life not in comparison with the routine of ordinary existence, but
rather within contending versions of the life of excellence. For Socrates, the Sophists
were only a current occasion of competition touting the rhetorical skills needed for public
power and advancement. From a philosophical point of view, the older and deeper
contextual competition for the soul of the Greeks was to be found in epic poetry and
tragic drama. It is surely important to insists that Socrates and Plato brought criticism
against Homer and the tragic dramatists out of a profound respect, that their criticism was
a form of compliment as well as complement.
The difficulty of conceiving Classical philosophy in this generous light is in part
the ironic tone and comportment of Socratic inquiry. To often, it lacks a sense of
generosity and appears rather to be a dismissal or debunking of every other form of
discourse. There is, however, a procedural point that has seldom been made clear in
Greek philosophy. Socrates‟ respect for critical discourse itself should be taken as
sufficient evidence not to discredit or dismiss the interlocutors. His ironic comportment
and barbed humor often leaves the modern student thinking that the whole thing is a
setup: that there is no honor in disputing with Socrates, and that Plato only makes use of
a preconceived litany, with an audience of stock characters and strawmen. It is a service
to the whole of the Platonic corpus and to the history of philosophy to read the Dialogues
such that the honor of inquiry and engaged discourse is taken for granted.
That Socrates is waging a contest in which he “always wins” is not so. Indeed if
that were the case, then Plato has only created a version of the super-Sophist, consistent
with Aristophanes‟ comic portrait of Socrates in The Clouds. The contemporary
assumption that argumentative discourse can only be adversarial is testimony to the
insight of the Sophists into the aggressive end of human nature. The analogue of a
television series in which Perry Mason always emerges victorious and the poor, dumb
prosecutor looks pathetic and resentful is unfortunately a common enough reading model
for the student. But clearly this is wrong in Plato‟s case, and in philosophy genreally
where it is genuine. It is crucial if seldom sufficient to remind students that Socrates
marks his success not against the interlocutors, but against what he believes to be
possible and accessible, the Truth. He inevitably falls short; that the interlocutors do so
as well, is not quite to the point. It is rather that Truth is what is important; discourse is
philosophically valuable not on its own terms, but in service only to the truth. What is
required for our purposes is to find a less preclusive analogue to this commitment in
poiesis, in the idea of life itself as a poetic task, and literature inclusive of its expression.
III
The Poetry of life.
Let us now consider the second approach to the connection between poetry, life,
and literature by addressing not poetry in life, but the poetry of life. What distinguishes
the poetic, whether in the context of life or in literature, is poiesis the essence of which is
creative activity. This is, of course, what life is and means: creation. In this rudimentary
sense life is poetry. Think of literature as taking up this creative energy from life, of
discovering resonance in its very being, and giving expression to the energy drawn from
that impulse. In which case, it is not difficult to determine the relation between poetic
life and literature, they have the same source in creative and compelling affirmation. The
poetic in literature is thus an extension of the creative and expressive intensity of the life
force itself. Literature takes many forms, settles into various genres, but the essence of
poetry and the poetic in whatever mode of literature it is found, is singular: it may or may
not re-present, describe, explain, or imitate nature; but always, it affirms life.
There are many ways to look at the universe, the mystery of creation and the
created. No final decision between an expanding bubble or rubber band theory of the
universe in physics—proto or meta—will dissolve the fact of its mystery. The origins of
life are not shrouded in mystery, they constitute a mystery. Literature has an advantage
in that it has no need to resolve or dispel mystery. To celebrate life in literature is not to
proclaim life a mystery; it is simply to participate in the poetry of its continuance. Two
common stories fit this originating portrait of the creative energy and expression of life.
The first is to picture a vast empty and cold universe and imagine a creative spark of life
generated in a vast darkness which somehow sustains itself. Another equally useful story
is that the universe itself is alive, is full of life. Organic life is only one of its limitless
forms; the cycles of birth and death are not limited to the organic, and moreover are just
ways of marking time. Finally, ultimately, life—organic and inorganic—is energy and
motion.
There are cultures and literatures in which the continuance of creative force is
taken as integrated and given. The Native American traditions and forms of life
recognize that all things are alive: the earth is alive, the stones and trees and rivers are
alive, the stars are alive... In the stories of these traditions, the beauty of life and its
poetry is an affirmation of its integrity and wholeness. This does not require purity,
symmetry or any other means of limiting measurement. Gerard Manley Hopkins in
another context nicely put the point: “Glory be to God for dappled things...all things
counter, original, spare, strange,/ Whatever is fickle, freckled/With swift, slow; sweet,
sour; adazle, dim/ He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.” Poetry in literature, as
in life, however diverse in expression or form, is of a piece and integral to the celebration
of life. When it is that, the poet, the reader, the listener feels a familiar quickening and
deep resonance with the flow of life.
IV
Poetry in Literature
What is there to be learned about life through poetic literature? The force and life
of poetry is found in the presencing within its expression, through sound and rhythm, of
the sense and substance of its reference. The opening line of Homer‟s great epic, the
Iliad, begins “The Wrath of Peleus‟ son, O Muse, resound...” What makes this line
poetic is not the description of a fictive figure in a Greek epic: Achilles comes alive in the
embodiment of that force of character wrought by the poet‟s words (Dryden‟s
translation). Somehow the tone of wrath is felt in the expression, through the language
itself. There is not room in this essay to undertake an anatomy of poetic language and
expression, but we need to mention these essentials: the human capacity and tradition of
the story (mythos), and the capacity of language (poiesis) through story and image to
appeal directly to the senses (aesthesos)--to embody phenomena in language. In poetry
at its very best-- poetry which is genuinely poetic, what critics call aesthetically effective-the appeal directly to sensuous apprehension means that we are presented not with
concepts to consider, but phenomena to assimilate and understand.
A poem does what prose does not, calls attention to itself and focuses the intensity
of its subject in such a way that it is embodied in the language. Schopenhauer
persuasively argues that music is the most elemental form of art, in that it is pure
expression. While literature and painting must in some sense represent what they are
about, music expresses what it is without reference to anything else. Music is what it
expresses. One could further extend Schopenhauer‟s point, however, to say that poetry is
the transformation of language into music, music into language, it gives an articulate
voice to sound. If music is the language of the soul, poetry is the soul of its language.
Prose is referential in the sense that we are directed away from the language to a
referent not present in the language. Poetry condenses phenomena into the contextual
sense of the expression itself. Again, the philosophical writer who perhaps best captures
this sense of universal immediacy of the genuinely poetic is Schopenhauer. Although he
is not speaking specifically of poetry, his analytic remarks fit the thesis we are
considering here. Schopenhauer conceives and portrays the acute aesthetic sense of
artistic experience as the concrete perception of the universal (he has in mind Plato‟s
eidos, but an ordinary notion of “ideal” will work as well.) A poetic experience of the
world is always of the immediate thing itself, but it is perceived and expressed in such a
way that the universal is manifest in it. In aesthetic viewing or poetic expression of a
person or painting, the image of a woman appears as the concrete particular she is, but is
at the same time transformed. She becomes, for example, not a naked body in the
immediacy of desire, but rather a nude figure apart from any individual interest or desire.
The poetic is the expression of the universal in the particular, and the aesthetic response
is precisely to see in the naked body of this woman, the form of beauty which is woman
herself. The poetics of this vision constitutes a phenomenology of the feminine.
Poetic movement depends not on conceptual abstraction, but aesthetic resonance:
the universal is brought to life within the concrete experience of the particular. Typically,
the poetic is an ecstatic experience of only a moment of rapture, as if looking into the
secret form of life itself. Schopenhauer clearly suggests that the most authentic--in our
terms here, poetic--existence, is one in which the genius of this moment grows into a way
of life. Whether or not this is possible for most of us, one way of measuring the greatness
of a poet is to remark on the duration as well as intensity of such moments of vision
which become integral in her work and character as an artist. It is doubtful that any
human being has ever been without the experience of at least one such moment which
makes up the poetry of life. It is within our capacity as human beings to live in this way.
The poetic is natural to all life, but it requires both intensity and simplicity to be realized.
Schopenhauer‟s philosophical analysis can be read as directions on how to
experience the world aesthetically. His thesis is in accord, for example with the idea that
Monet‟s paintings are exercises in learning how to see. It is in this sense that art, at its
very best as poetic as well as at its worst as camp and kitsch, is didactic: we learn how to
see and feel and think, and so how to live well. Various alternatives to poetic dwelling
divide between the more or less acute abstractions of analytic measurement or else
common distractions into the ease of enjoyment. But, for all of us, in those brief moments
of ecstasy in art, we are at one with the poetry of life.
What is important in the poetry of life and literature is to see into the heart of
paradox. Intrinsic to poetry is the paradox of time and place.
„...What‟s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has forever‟ (Browning).
In poetry there is always and never “Now”, there is always and never “Here”.
„Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to
day... (Shakespeare)
But which and whose tomorrows? Macbeth‟s and mine; everyone‟s and anyone‟s.
„...And all our pleasures are like yesterdays‟ (John Donne)
And our yesterdays are all the same—as yesterdays—however distanced our pleasures.
In Shakespeare‟s works, even the “Histories “ carry the poetic presencing of
distance:
„This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!‟
Richard II‟s England? Shakespeare‟s England? Yes, and also anyone‟s
homeland.
„...Come, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings‟
English Kings? Yes, and also the sad fact and common lot of all life, that its genius is a
plaything of time over which death holds dominion. The secret of the poetic is that this
foreknowledge of inevitable and real pain is diminished in its effect by the sharing of
stories. Death is not always tragic and being alive is not always poetic. The transforming
energy of art, however, as evidenced above, is persuasive concerning the generative force
of poetic life, and promising as a redemptive form of human mortality.
V
Poetry and Tragedy: the beautiful, and the sublime
Turning to literature proper to search for examples of the poetry of life, two
genres seem most promising--poetry and tragic drama. Each represents a quite different
if not opposite expression of the poetic temperament in literature. This difference, in turn,
may provide a crucial insight into a basic division of poetic modalities in life. Hopefully
it will not require much print to support the idea that poetry and tragedy are two
fundamental paradigms of literature, its two most definitive genres: poetry as elemental
to, and tragedy as comprehensive of, the experience of human existence.
Poetry, as the closest expression to poiesis which defines the creative process of
art, perhaps requires no justification here at all. Tragic drama, on almost all accounts
beginning with Aristotle‟s Poetics, has been regarded as the inner core of concentric
circles which constitute the totality of literature. Its defining status has been argued on
many aesthetic levels, usually, that it is the most complex and comprehensive of all
literary forms and the most difficult both to write and comprehend. But the most
important aspect of this art form is its intimate connection with the life experience of any
thoughtful person. The tragic vision of this drama uncovers a depth expression of the
human condition itself. It confronts the singular and difficult fact of human existence
that the human being knows she is going to die, that suffering is the lot of human beings,
and that life is a struggle every individual will lose. The art of tragedy is to show the
nobility of this inevitable failure, the magnificence of the human spirit which faces up to
this knowledge, that strives with and against the relentless logic of time and existence.
There are two basic intuitions here, which concern a fundamental difference
between the poetry of life, and poetry in life. This difference is related to the two primary
effects and traditional achievements of literature and art: the beautiful, and the sublime.
First, the poetry of life is natural in the sense that it is a seamless flow of energy that
accommodates all things, all variations, meets with no obstacles, is pure affirmation. The
poetry of this motion is what we understand and comprehend as beauty: in the glory of a
rainbow and the glow of a sunset we see a fittingness of all things, as in a fine summer
day when we feel as one with the whole of life. In literature, the genre of poetry proper is
a mirror of this natural flow; in its simplest description, it is affirmation. On this account,
poetry is the celebration of beauty, the expression of the beautiful. This idea can be
carried through at length to discern features of consequence for understanding poetry.
For example the innocence of a child carries a kind of natural beauty, a life-poetry of its
own. Although literary poetry is not always in its expression a purity of this sort, it does
cultivate an innocence of perception not unlike that of the child who conceives no
distance or defense, feels nothing alien to her interests or regard. Where poetry is not a
direct expression of this natural acceptance and affirmation, it is an attempt to retrieve
innocence, a feeling of oneness with the world. Where poetry is not direct affirmation of
life it is an appeal for reconciliation with life. Poetry seeks the rhythm of the natural
metabolism of and in time; the paradigm of this genre is a poetics of confluence.
In direct contrast with this, the poetry in life is a poetics of conflict. The struggle
of human life is “unnatural” in the sense that it is centered in the conflict of human
aspiration set against earth and time. The constructive effort of the human being is no
longer in natural accord with time and space, but seeks to contend with and conquer both,
to substitute its own rhythm and measure. The literary analogue of this poetics of conflict
is tragic drama, which strives not for an expression of beauty in life, but for a sense of the
sublime in human suffering. The tragic vision is not one of reconciliation with the
oneness of life, but the self-realization of the inevitability of defeat intrinsic to the human
condition. Tragic drama reaches into the depths of human aspiration to discover a
nobility of spirit commensurate with the human being‟s conception of himself as a beast
who would be god. Impatient being a beast and incapable of becoming a god, tragic
drama intensifies the conflict of the human individual with herself, a tearing conflict of
knowledge and passion. Shakespeare memorably and typically understates the point in
Hamlet‟s distancing from the passion of engagement, in the familiar soliloquy:
“What a piece of work is a man! How able in reason!
How infinite in faculty! in form!...in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals...this quintessence of dust!
Man delights not me...”
Tragic drama eschews the wisdom of accommodation, and the ease of letting be what is.
It is the story of the individual‟s passion to overcome the inevitability of logic, to surpass
what is possible.
It is now taken as given that the point of tragic drama is the self-realization of the
hero. Aristotle‟s recording of this defining feature was part of his effort to make tragedy
conform in the end to the dictates of rationality and show the superiority of knowledge
and reason over passion. The difficulty of his proposal is that it seems to reduce tragic
vision to an exercise in unreason, and return drama to a poetics of harmonic accord. The
appeal of such rational resolution is evidenced by the continued success Aristotle‟s
Poetics still commands. The recommendation of this essay, however, is that we keep an
open mind about the matter. Kant‟s distinction between beauty and sublimity, altered by
Schopenhauer, and dramatized by Nietzsche, that the genius of tragic drama requires
worshipping at the shrines of two gods--Apollo and Dionysos--suggests that the poetics
of tragedy may best be understood not as resolution, but as creating an aesthetic tension,
a dynamic portrait of unresolved conflict within the human condition itself.
Having said this, I should add the obvious codicil, already alluded to above, that
literature is a more complex phenomenon than any critical rule can or should hope to
accommodate. Tragic drama of course contains poetry of exceeding beauty, and there are
poems that brook tragic vision. There are, in Karsten Harries‟ expression, metaphors of
collusion and collision in both genres. Shakespeare‟s extended metaphors in Tragedies,
Histories, and Sonnets, often bridge beauty and sublimity. Lyric expression in the
absence of dramatic conflict still produces tragic vision. Consider two familiar examples
from the work of Yeats, who is the subject of Auden‟s remark quoted at the beginning of
this essay. The first is a vision out of animus mundi which ends The second Coming with
the lines “...and what rough beast its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem
to be born?”. The second example is a condensed image of lust and carnage which
comprehends so much of Greek epic and tragic literature in Yeats‟ lines from “Leda and
the Swan”: “...A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof
and tower,/ And Agamemnon dead.” The simple lyric beauty in such images has given
way to the sublime passion of tragic vision.
What all this suggests is that the fundamental mode of poetry is being, and its
reconciling effect a poetics of beauty. The contrasting and complementary mode of
tragedy is action, and its conflicting tensions a poetics of sublimity. In life too, there are
optional perspectives, and we live them all. The poetry in and of life is not reducible to
these two literary paradigms, but they serve as limits. Recall Horace Walpole‟s remark
that for those who think, life is a comedy, for those who feel, a tragedy. Every
oversimplification which becomes memorable has its lesson. We have not discussed the
poetics of the comic, or the tragicomic, the poetics of work and leisure, of enjoyment and
worship. These too, form the fabric of our lives. We must in closing return to our original
point, that life itself is poetic, and the mode of its poiesis is a continuous process of
motion and change, growth and decay, death and regeneration. There are no final limits
here, and that, of course, is the beauty of it.